Name as it appears on the ballot:  Sam J. Ervin, IV 

Age:  66

Party affiliation:  Democratic

Campaign website:  www.ervinforjustice.org

Occupation & employer:  Associate Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina; Administrative Office of the Courts, State of North Carolina

1. Please tell us what in your record as a public official or private citizen demonstrates your ability to be effective, fair, and impartial on the bench?  Please be specific.  What do you believe qualifies you to serve as a Supreme Court Justice?

I believe that I am qualified to serve as a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina based upon my education, professional experience, and judicial philosophy.  After graduating with honors Harvard Law School in 1981, I practiced law with the Morganton, North Carolina, firm of Byrd, Byrd, Ervin, Whisnant, McMahon & Ervin, P.A., and its predecessors from 1981 until 1999.  During that time, I handled a wide variety of civil, criminal, and administrative matters, including many appeals to the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court.  From 1999 until 2009, I served as a member of the North Carolina Utilities Commission, which is responsible for regulating the rates charged and service provided by privately-owned electric, natural gas, and water and sewer companies and which functions very much like a court.  During my tenure as a Utilities Commissioner, I served as Chair of the Committee on Electricity of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.  In 2008, I was elected to the North Carolina Court of Appeals, on which I served from 2009 through 2015.  In 2014, I was elected to the Supreme Court of North Carolina, on which I have served since 2015.  As a Judge of the Court of Appeals and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, I have written hundreds of opinions and have been involved in deciding more than a thousand cases.  I believe that an analysis of my opinions indicates that I have the ability to decide individual cases in a fair and impartial manner while treating everyone as equal under the law, giving everyone a fair hearing, and refraining from attempting to implement any sort of political or ideological agenda.

2. How do you define yourself politically? How does that impact your judicial approach?

Although I am the Democratic Party nominee for the seat on the Supreme Court that I currently occupy, I do not believe that appellate judges should attempt to implement any sort of political or ideological agenda in deciding specific cases. Instead, I believe that Supreme Court Justices are called upon to decide specific cases based upon a fair, impartial, and dispassionate effort to apply the existing law to the facts of the case under consideration while giving everyone a fair hearing and treating everyone as equal under the law and have utilized that philosophy during my service as a Utilities Commissioner, a Judge of the Court of Appeals, and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.  I have not hesitated to rule against any particular party or interest in the event that my understanding of the law and the facts caused me to conclude that such a ruling would be appropriate.  On the other hand, I have not hesitated to rule in favor of any particular party or interest if I thought that the law and the facts called for such a result.  I have typically declined to comment on the merits of particular policy-related questions during my campaigns for judicial office because the political views of a particular member of the judiciary should not affect the manner in which that person decides a particular case and because expressing opinions concerning such issues could impair public confidence in the fairness and impartiality of the judicial system.

3. What do you believe are the three most important qualities a judge must have to be an effective jurist?  Which judges, past or present, do you most admire?  Why?

The three most important qualities for any judicial official are fairness, patience, and a commitment to equal treatment of everyone in accordance with the law.  All judges need to give each litigant a fair hearing; decide each case based solely on the law and the facts without having any partisan or ideological agenda; and treat everyone in the same situation in the same way.  This basic understanding of what judges should do is derived from my many conversations with my grandfather, who served as a Superior Court Judge and an Associate Justice of the State Supreme Court, and my father, who was a Superior Court Judge and Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.  When we talked, my grandfather regularly expressed the belief that no one was above the law, which applied equally to everyone.  During our conversations, my father emphasized that the decisions that judges made had real impact on real people and that judges should take the cases that they are called upon to decide very seriously for that reason.  I try to adhere to the admonitions that I received from my grandfather and my father in carrying out my work at the Supreme Court.

4. In a sentence, how would you describe your judicial philosophy?

A judge should give each person a fair hearing, treat everyone equally under the law, and decide each case fairly and impartially based upon an analysis of nothing other than the law and the facts without attempting to implement any sort of partisan or ideological agenda.

5. Do you favor or oppose public financing of judicial elections? What changes to North Carolina’s system of judicial elections do you believe are necessary, if any?

At the time that I first ran for judicial office, North Carolina had a public financing program applicable to appellate judicial races.  I supported that program when it existed and participated in it during my 2008 race for the Court of Appeals and my unsuccessful 2012 race for the Supreme Court.  However, the General Assembly eliminated the judicial public financing system in 2013.  As a result, candidates for for appellate judicial office are now required to attempt to raise large sums of money in order to educate voters and to defend themselves against attacks from ideologically-based political organizations like the ones that spent large amounts of money against me in 2012 and have begun to do the same thing in this year as well. I believe that the amount of money being raised and spent in judicial races poses a threat to public confidence in the existence of a fair, impartial, and non-ideological judiciary.

I would also prefer that North Carolina select judges using nonpartisan, rather than partisan, elections.  The General Assembly’s decision to make North Carolina the first state in nearly a century to adopt the use of partisan elections strikes me as an extremely unfortunate one.  Judicial officials are required to decide cases based upon the law, the facts, and nothing else while giving everyone a fair opportunity to be heard and treating everyone equally under the law.  Although judges are not supposed to try to implement partisan or ideological agendas through their decisions, the use of partisan judicial elections suggests to voters that is perfectly appropriate for judges to act in a partisan manner and for voters to evaluate judicial candidates as if they were running for non-judicial office.  While the advocates of partisan judicial elections claim that placing party labels on the ballot gives voters information that they wish to have, the information that voters receive through the use of a partisan election system says nothing about what the candidates on the ballots should actually being doing if they are elected.  For all of these reasons, I am convinced that North Carolina’s return to partisan judicial elections is likely to result in declining public confidence in the judicial system.

6. In many cases, voters know very little about the judges they are electing.  Tell us something about yourself that our readers may be surprised to learn.

I think that most voters would be surprised to know that, for many years, I have officiated high school, middle school, and age-group soccer matches and have helped officiate three high school state finals, once as an assistant referee and twice as the fourth official.  I also suspect that most voters would be surprised to know that I have hiked to the top of all forty of the mountains in the southeastern United States that are more than 6,000 feet in height, the vast majority of which are wholly or partially located in North Carolina.

7. What sets you apart from the other candidate in this race?

The biggest difference between me and my opponent is that nature and breadth of our legal experience. I practiced law for almost 18 years, during which I handled many different types of civil, criminal, and administrative matters, having participated in numerous jury trials and many appeals to the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals.  I have also served for 23 years in some sort of judicial or quasi-judicial office and have an extensive record of judicial and quasi-judicial decisionmaking.  As that record demonstrates, I can fairly and impartially decide the cases that come before the Supreme Court based solely on the law and the facts and have not hesitated to rule in favor of parties with whom I do not share a party affiliation when a fair and impartial application of the law to the facts indicates that I should do so.  As a result, I have a much broader range of legal and judicial experience than my opponent and, unlike him, can point to specific instances in which I have made judicial decisions that one would not have predicted based solely upon my political affiliation.  As evidence of my ability to be fair and impartial, I note that I have been endorsed by both the North Carolina Advocates for Justice, an organization of lawyers who represent civil plaintiffs and criminal defendants, and the North Carolina Association of Defense Attorneys, an organization of lawyers who represent businesses and civil defendants, even though they regularly oppose each other in court. I attribute this result to both organizations’ confidence that I will fairly and impartially decide the cases in which they and their clients are involved.

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